A Story’s Worth One Thousand Boards

If nobody’s going to say it then I will: creating stories is hard. Don’t get me wrong they’re incredibly fun and I love making them more then anything but they’re really difficult.

When I try to tell a story I have a tendency to ramble, stop in the middle of sentence, explain a side point, go off on a small tangent and then after a lot of unnecessary details finally reach the end, alone. If I don’t rehearse everything I have to say I might end up sounding silly.

But this is exactly why I love creating story boards so much. The message is delivered quickly and without question, if done correctly. They can be clear, concise, charming and make a point better than I ever could.

But they’re hard! Really hard. After my first attempt at creating my own 3,4 and 5 panel stories I had to scrap everything and start over. That’s not a bad thing of course but it did take 5 hours I’ll never get back.

And even after that I wasn’t completely happy. Below are two images of my stories.

After my second storyboard was presented to the class they made notes that it was too predictable. I agreed, even though this one was already a step up from my first rough draft. My classmates had the idea that instead of a monster popping up, maybe the witches’ Uber eats order could pop up instead. I loved it.

Getting outside opinions can really take your work to the next level, but you have to be willing to rework what you have in order to make it really succeed. It’s hard, it’s a lot of work, but it’s so worth it.